Here's how it works. Right-click a GIF. Send it to your GIFme, which is a little window that hangs down from the toolbar of your browser. Type in three or four tags. Behold it in its catalogued glory--

--then, deploy it, exactly, perfectly, at the right time in a conversation. Your correspondent has now been startled, flummoxed, assailed by your expert GIF.

I find GIFme charming, because it's one of a few tools that have recently sprung up around the archiving and maintenance of one's GIFs. GIFs traffic in novelty: To surprise or delight with a GIF, you need a large lexicon of them. You need, in short, all the standard tools of knowledge creation: a well-kept personal collection; a larger archive, open to anybody; a method of combining and remixing.

If GIFme helps you make a personal GIF collection, Giphy is the larger archive. It's a GIF search engine of sorts from Betaworks, and it launched this February to, uh, tepid reviews. Giphy seems to show that making a pure GIF search engine is hard, perhaps because GIFs, in their current, reactive usage, don't travel with much context. So, now, Giphy is a kind of GIF portal. There's still a big search box at the top, still, but there's also a place to get artistic GIFs and emotionally-coded GIFs and, crucially, timely GIFs, from, say, Doctor Who or Breaking Bad).

Giphy seems the fashionable, upscale Times Square of GIF discovery, compared to the spare, almost deadpan Bukk.it, a catalog of GIFs maintained by web designer Ethan Marcotte. Bukkit is little more than a list of file names and file sizes, an Old, Weird Internet-style UNIX folder on a server, but its names for GIFs have an internal, consistent wit. There are the four "Thanks, Obama" gifs, all captured from different infomercials; there's a memorable, editorializing clip named "webdesign.gif."

These new GIF tools of collection and recollection enrich, in their way, the Internet's GIF marketplace. They make the life of the amateur and professional GIF-er easier, lending a little organization to the hectic flow and ebb of GIFs. And (most importantly) they'll let you announce, as you prepare a Tumblr riposte, "To the archives!"